Historian explains the mind of Conspiracy Nuts - CBS 1967

[Walt Cakebread]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/the-kennedy-assassination-47-years-later-what-do-we-really-know/66722/

"...Popular belief in a conspiracy was widespread within a week of Kennedy's murder. Between November 25 and 29, 1963,
University of Chicago pollsters asked more than 1,000 Americans whom they thought was responsible for the president's
death. By then, the chief suspect, Oswald -- a leftist who had lived for a time in Soviet Union -- had been shot dead
while in police custody by Jack Ruby, a local hoodlum with organized crime connections.

While the White House, the FBI, and the Dallas Police Department all affirmed that Oswald had acted alone, 62 percent
of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved in the assassination. Only 24 percent thought
Oswald had acted alone. Another poll taken in Dallas during the same week found 66 percent of respondents believing that
there had been a plot. There were no JFK conspiracy theories in print at that time..."

==================

"...many senior U.S. officials concluded that there had been a plot but rarely talked about it openly.

Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, publicly endorsed the Warren Commissions conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Privately,
LBJ told many people, ranging from Atlantic contributor Leo Janos to CIA director Richard Helms, that he did not believe the
lone-gunman explanation.

The president's brother Robert and widow Jacqueline also believed that he had been killed by political enemies, according to
historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali. In their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev,
Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964, they reported that William Walton -- a friend of the First Lady -- went to Moscow on a previously
scheduled trip a week after JFK's murder. Walton carried a message from RFK and Jackie for their friend, Georgi Bolshakov, a
Russian diplomat who had served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 crisis:
RFK and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that "despite Oswald's connections to the communist world, the Kennedys
believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents."

In the Senate, Democrats Richard Russell of Georgia and Russell Long of Louisiana both rejected official accounts of the assassination.
In the executive branch, Joseph Califano, the General Counsel of Army in 1963 and later Secretary of Health Education and Welfare,
concluded that Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy.* In the White House, H.R. Haldeman, chief of staff to President Richard Nixon,
wanted to reopen the JFK investigation in 1969. Nixon wasn't interested.

Suspicion persisted in the upper echelons of the U.S. national security agencies, as well. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of Pentagon
special operations in 1963 (and later an adviser to Stone), believed that there had been a plot.

Winston Scott, chief of the CIA's station in Mexico City at the time of Kennedy's murder and an ultra-conservative Agency loyalist,
rejected the Warren Commission's findings about a trip that Oswald had taken to Mexico six weeks before the assassination. Scott
concluded in an unpublished memoir that Oswald had, indeed, been just a patsy.

None of these figures was a paranoid fantasist. To the contrary, they constituted a cross section of the American power elite in 1963.
Neither did they talk about a JFK conspiracy for public consumption; they talked about it only reservedly, in confined circles..."

Lyndon Johnson, publicly endorsed the Warren Commissions conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Privately,
LBJ told many people, ranging from Atlantic contributor Leo Janos to CIA director Richard Helms, that he did not believe the
lone-gunman explanation.

LBJ was just being the sly old fox.....  He knew damned well that there had been a conspiracy...because He and Hoover had endorsed the plot.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

This is the general "the government killed JFK" conspiracy argument:

Earl Warren and the commission and all of the staffers - some still alive - covered up the assassination.

The HSCA covered it up. The various other smaller investigations - the Clark Panel, the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee - also covered it up. All of the men and women involved covered it up.

The news media's investigations - the Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS, ABC, PBS - all covered it up.

Independent investigators - a Posner, a Bugliosi - all covered it up. Various historians and other scholars like Robert Caro who found no conspiracy have covered it up. I guess we can add the very liberal Henry Steel Commager to the list (he was a vehement critic of LBJ and condemned the CIA for, in his view, acting illegally and unconstitutionally).

Fifty plus years of coverups. NOT that all of the people were wrong. Maybe they were. I don't think so. But perhaps they were misled, perhaps a sort of "groupthink" affected them. They just got it wrong. Okay. But that is not the claim. The conspiracy claim is they deliberately covered up the assassination. Why would they do that? It's never explained. They just did.

Commager was right: to the conspiracist believer nothing will dissuade them of their fixation. Every subsequent investigation that shows no conspiracy is part of the conspiracy. If we created a time machine that sent people back to observe the assassination and they found no conspiracy - Oswald acted one - that too would be said to be part of the coverup.

[Thomas Graves]

This is the general "the government killed JFK" conspiracy argument:

Earl Warren and the commission and all of the staffers - some still alive - covered up the assassination.

The HSCA covered it up. The various other smaller investigations - the Clark Panel, the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee - also covered it up. All of the men and women involved covered it up.

The news media's investigations - the Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS, ABC, PBS - all covered it up.

Independent investigators - a Posner, a Bugliosi - all covered it up. Various historians and other scholars like Robert Caro who found no conspiracy have covered it up. I guess we can add the very liberal Henry Steel Commager to the list (he was a vehement critic of LBJ and condemned the CIA for, in his view, acting illegally and unconstitutionally).

Fifty plus years of coverups. NOT that all of the people were wrong. Maybe they were. I don't think so. But perhaps they were misled, perhaps a sort of "groupthink" affected them. They just got it wrong. Okay. But that is not the claim. The conspiracy claim is they deliberately covered up the assassination. Why would they do that? It's never explained. They just did.

Commager was right: to the conspiracist believer nothing will dissuade them of their fixation. Every subsequent investigation that shows no conspiracy is part of the conspiracy. If we created a time machine that sent people back to observe the assassination and they found no conspiracy - Oswald acted one - that too would be said to be part of the coverup.

Steve M.,

>>> S A R C A S M  .  A L E R T <<<

True JFK Assassination researchers KNOW the reason Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover and and Earl Warren, et al., had to cover it up wasn't because the Ruskies, through triple-agents Aleksei Kulak and Ivan Obyedkov, et al., had put a WW III Virus in Oswald's CIA file, but because ... gasp ... evil, evil, evil James Angleton had done so by contriving to make it look as though Oswald had been in contact with putative "Department 13" Valeriy Kostikov, ... except ... hmm ... Kostikov had been made "radioactive" by the KGB, itself, and the Soviet embassy security guard, Ivan Obyedkov, who "volunteered" Kostikov's name to Oswald or an Oswald impersonator over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phone line was a triple-agent (i.e., a KGB officer whom CIA thought was working for CIA but in reality was still loyal to the KGB).

Hmm ...

--  MWT 

[Ross Lidell]

What about a reasoned response to Mr Galbraith's comment? Like providing "supporting evidence" rather than a rude reply?

[Ross Lidell]

As far back as 1967 a brilliant historian explained the Conspiracy "mentality".
He predicted that another investigation (or 3 or 4) of the JFK Assassination would not convince doubters because they possess the "conspiracy mentality". It's persists 52 years later... right here.

This is from the 1967 CBS News Inquiry - the Warren Report.

... The conspiracy theory, the conspiracy mentality will not accept ordinary evidence ..... There’s some psychological requirement: It forces them to reject the ordinary and find refuge in the extraordinary...

Mr Commager's most undeniably accurate insight is: "...the conspiracy mentality will not accept ordinary evidence".

Ordinary evidence like:

-- Oswald fled from the place where shots were fired (TSBD) that killed President Kennedy.

-- Oswald lied about his superior informing him that there would be no more work (at the TSBD) due to the assassination.

Subsequently:

-- Oswald returned to his residence to fetch a revolver.

-- Oswald was identified as using a pistol to kill Officer JD Tippit.
-- Oswald was identified as the man seen running away from the scene of the Tippit murder holding a pistol in his hand.

-- Oswald attempted to shoot Officer N.M. McDonald with a revolver as he (Oswald) was about to be arrested.

That's circumstantial evidence which cannot logically be attributed to framing by cunning conspirators. Oswald acted independently without guidance or manipulation by others.

The conspiracy "mentality" denies all that "interlocking guilty behavior" and elevates suspicion, speculation and conjecture as superior.

[John Iacoletti]

What about a reasoned response to Mr Galbraith's comment? Like providing "supporting evidence" rather than a rude reply?

Supporting evidence of what? Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The idea that the various TV specials somehow “support” the conclusion that Oswald did it and acted alone is absurd. At best they supported the notion that it could have happened that way.

[Ross Lidell]

Supporting evidence of what? Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The idea that the various TV specials somehow “support” the conclusion that Oswald did it and acted alone is absurd. At best they supported the notion that it could have happened that way.

Oswald's movements and actions--after the assassination shots were fired from the TSBD--are evidence.

Explain why this piece of evidence is not, in your opinion, evidence:

 -- Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to shoot officer Nick McDonald with his (Oswald's) revolver when about to be arrested.

[Thomas Graves]

Supporting evidence of what? Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The idea that the various TV specials somehow “support” the conclusion that Oswald did it and acted alone is absurd. At best they supported the notion that it could have happened that way.

Iacoletti,

Rhetorical question:  Do you define the term "evidence" narrowly or broadly?

Depends on whether it tends to incriminate Oswald or exonerate him?

LOL

--  MWT